Dec 29: Avatar and environmentalism

There has been a lot of coverage of the recent sequel to Avatar (2009) which grossed more than any other film and is approaching $3 trillion.

The new film has got mixed reviews. Mark Kermode was definitely not a fan - see later.

Pandora is not a real place of course.

Many have picked up on the environmental messages in the film.

The director James Cameron has previously talked about the importance of storytelling, and this piece in the Guardian is worth reading on that for some interesting quotes.

His [Cameron's] teenage dream of Pandora was somewhere between a heterocosm – the imaginary world of an adult author intended for publication such as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast – and a paracosm, an imaginary world conjured by a child that, in its original form, is almost entirely private.

The word paracosm is worthy of further investigation - films often create imaginary worlds of course, but are seldom made by children.

Thirty-two of the 50 top-grossing movies of all time are films that belong to identifiable fantasy universes – Pandora, Oz, Narnia, Middle-earth, Hogwarts, Neverland, Wonderland – luring moviegoers into theatres with the promise of return to a beloved fictional world, like a tourist returning to their favourite spot.

Here's Mark Kermode's review of the film....

Here's Oli Mould's review of the film which adds a distinctly geographical perspective and some further reading.